Abbes and Davison removed drywall to expose the brick on one wall in the living room. "As we began to expose that brick, we found the old metal framing that they used to use," Daivson says. "They used to stick chicken-mesh wire on it and put plaster on top. When we exposed the brick, we found this metal detail and decided to keep it." Photo by Alan Gastelum.

"In the kitchen, we changed the layout," Davison says. "It was a galley kitchen, extending lengthways into the room. We spun it back along the back wall. The tiles are Moroccan concrete tiles that came from a supplier here in Manhattan. The idea was to inject some color and playfulness into the space with the blue cabinetry." Photo by Alan Gastelum.

A parallelogram-shaped window pane, rescued from an architectural salvage yard, was outfitted with steel edges and casters, and repurposed as a coffee table. Photo by Alan Gastelum.

Not long ago, James Davison and his wife, Fanny Abbes, left lucrative careers in finance to start a company, the New Project Group, that rents out designed, furnished apartments in New York City. More recently, the pair parlayed Abbes’ degree from Parsons the New School for Design into a subsidiary interior-design venture that they are calling the New Design Project.

For one of their first projects, they were approached by a young couple who had just bought their first apartment, a cramped, uninviting space on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “They bought it back in October or November, and it didn’t have much going for it; it needed a complete overhaul,” Davison says. “So they asked us to come in and gut-renovate it. So we ripped out the kitchen, ripped out the bathroom, and gave it a complete cosmetic makeover.”